Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition's transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of Romantic Ecocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.
Introduction - Dewey W. Hall
Chapter 1. Ecological Horology: The Nature of Time during the Romantic Period - Marcus Tomalin
Chapter 2. Naturalists’ Interpretations: Daffodils, Swallows, and a Floating Island - Dewey W. Hall
Chapter 3. ‘It cannot be a sin to seek to save an earth-born being’: Radical Ecotheology in Byron’s Heaven and Earth - J. Andrew Hubbell
Chapter 4. Process and Presence: Geological Influence and Innovation in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ - Bryon Williams
Chapter 5. ‘Perpetual Analogies’ and ‘Occult Harmonies’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Ecological Selves - Kaitlin Mondello
Chapter 6. An Uncertain Spirit of an Unstable Place: Frankenstein in the Anthropocene - Shalon Noble
Chapter 7. Wild West and Western Wildness: A Transatlantic Perspective - Jude Frodyma
Chapter 8. Ecocentering the Self: William Howitt, Thoreau, and the Environmental Imagination -Ryan David Leack
Chapter 9. Toward a Romantic Poetics of Acknowledgement: Wordsworth, Clare, and Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ - Gary Harrison
Chapter 10. Small is Beautiful: Rethinking Localism from Wordsworth to Eliot - Alicia Carroll
Chapter 11. Byron’s Flower Power: Ecology and Effeminacy in Sardanapalus -Colin Carman
Chapter 12. The Miseducation of Chris McCandless: Romanticism, Reading, and Environmental Education - Lisa Ottum
Dewey W. Hall is professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is also the author of Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789-1912 (2014).